The Website Marketing Group Blog

After 14 years of working in this industry, every day is a new learning curve which is why we love the job. In this blog, you will find some of our findings on various “the best things of the web” to keep you up to date with the latest news in the Internet business. From small businesses to Australia’s leading brands across multiple sectors and disciplines, this means we know what works and what doesn’t, allowing us to deliver tangible results that benefit your business where it really matters. Whether it is a new brand identity-logo design, a social media marketing, a complex website, an email marketing campaign or all of the above and more, our team can deliver the solution for your business. Contact us today on 1300 911 772.

Congratulations to the TWMG Team ! The Website Marketing Group has been successful in making the Smart50 for the SmartCompany Smart50 Awards 2011.

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Facebook ad is a difficult thing to deal with. However, it may not as hard as you might think of.

Creating a promoted post on Facebook is easy enough, but making sure it reaches the right audience and is worth the investment takes a little bit more effort. With a number of options available to help you connect with your customers, an informed approach can make all the difference. Take a look at the tips presented in a beautiful infographic below to make sure you don’t miss something that could have made your Facebook sponsored post more successful.

LinkedIn is definitely a powerful platform for building your professional brand.

This statement has been supported in recent times by the increase in content being published, shared and read on site. In fact, LinkedIn has reported that they have seen a two until three times increase in referral traffic in 2016, while members are now publishing more than 160K long-form posts via LinkedIn Publisher every week.

However, in order to truly capitalize on the potential of LinkedIn as a personal branding tool, particularly in regards to using LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform, you have to know what types of content are getting traction with your LinkedIn audience.

That said, as with all social media marketing, you need a platform-specific approach – what works on Twitter won’t necessarily resonate on Instagram, for example.

So what type of content works best on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn’s Marketing Solutions team has created this new infographic as a guide, the result of a survey of more than 9,000 LinkedIn members. There’s a lot of great insights here – take a look and see what you might want to implement with your LinkedIn content strategy.

It’s undeniable that social media is one of the most effective promotion for businesses.

Google+ is a feature rich platform at par with other leading social media websites. However, as it is with Google the visibility and a complete package of services makes it an interesting, under-utilised but a significant player.

Google+ has a strong international following. In India 80 percent of internet users have a Google+ account, and almost 40 percent are regularly active on it. In today’s post, we will share six tips on how to maximise your Google+ account for business promotion. We’ll start with:

1. Sign Up A Google+ Business Listing Account

Probably the most important feature of Google+, the Business Listings is a crucial tool for local business owners and service providers. To have your business/service enlisted on Google+ significantly improves search visibility. Other benefit to this service is that, it allows customers to call you, find directions to your business place and also check out your verified website. The customer can see all the information at one place.

It improves customer interaction as well. Your business’ listing allows your business’ photos and YouTube videos to feature on your page, which is easily accessible by customers. Customers can also leave comments or reviews for your services right on your business page. This will enable you to get feedback and work on them quickly.

2. Create And Add People To Your Circles

Google+ Circles offers an effective way to selectively segregate your contacts and share content and updates with them. Your contacts can be branched down as – friends, customers, business partners, affiliates or influencers you follow

It is a handy tool that can send an email with updates to a large number of people. This can be a tedious task using Gmail as the mailer comes with a few restrictions of its own, one being the number of recipients you can choose for your updates.

3. Create And Join Communities

Just like we have our own communities of people we meet and talk to, Google+ Communities offers the users a similar experience virtually. Google+ Communities is a solution for people who would like to meet other people sharing the same interests, ideas, passion or cause.

As quoted by Google spokesperson, Guy Kawasaki, “Communities have transformed Google+ into a more deeply connected environment; people’s favorite communities have become a starting point for their Google+ activity each day. Whether you are representing your brand with a passion, Google+ Communities are a great way to connect with like-minded people.

Also it is a great way to network with people who like your business or share ideas on your cause. It may also be something related to hobbies, interests or even a fan following. Photography communities are wildly popular and are a great way for professionals and beginners to network with other photographers or just learn a lot.

4. Create And Categorise Content Through Collections

Collections offer a hassle free way to organise your posts in chosen topics. What this means is that, all the content that you share on Google+ can be categorised under a collection relevant to the topic. With using social media scheduling tool like SocialPilot you can easily schedule your post in advance on multiple Google+ collections at once and that saves your lots of time and efforts.

In fact, it is rightly so. Surveys show that business owners have seen drastic change in flow of traffic to their pages or websites once their collections had been featured. If you have a business page, this might be the first step you need to take in terms of creating your presence on the online platform.

Collections offer you the freedom to share what you want. Business people could share photos of their products or services while an NGO could showcase their campaigns. Something simpler could be a collection of books that you’re reading. In this case, it is your imagination that limits you. The audience needs to connect to the topic of your collection and your work.

5. Create A Hangout

Hangouts by far have been Google+’s most popular online tool since its inception. It was well received by business professionals, politicians, creative professionals, marketers, youth and perhaps everyone caught up to it. It provides great functionality and connects to the audience in a more intimate way.

Today, Hangouts are much more than chat box messengers. They are being used as tools to create and promote events. It could be a webinar, a product launch, a political Q&A or even a conversation on a topic of interest. Business professionals use it for video conferencing. Families use it to connect to loved one across the world. What Hangouts does is it reaches out and connects to people/audience and engages them on social media.

Hangouts and Hangouts on Air could not have come in the market at a more beneficial time. It is no surprise that they are the most popular services of Google. In an age where video and audio interface and communication is all the rage, Hangouts is bound to see a rise. This benefits business professionals and event managers as well.

6. Network With Influencers

One of the many perks of Google+ is that it allows you to discover, connect and build relationships on a more personal level. Big time industrial influencers are handy assets to have in association if you plan to take your business anywhere. You can find and add influencers to your circles through Communities. Like, follow and share their posts to get noticed by these influencers. Feature their posts in your collections.

Although Google+ never became quite as popular as Facebook or any other social media tools, and neither will it in the near future, it still is a valuable tool for digital marketers and business influencers to attract an audience. It delivers a solid punch and what’s more, you don’t have to pay to market your products or business here.

How Fast Should A Website Load?

That may sound like an unusual question to some people. You may think that different websites should load in a different amount of time. Maybe one has a lot of high quality images on it and another one is plain text. Well, none of that really matters as your viewers and potential customers are generally not taking any of that into account, they don’t want to wait.

For example, a survey showed that almost half (47%) of customers expect that your website will be finished loading within two seconds. Almost two thirds (64%) of smartphone users expect that your website will be finished loading within four seconds.

These demands may be unreasonable ones to make as people often share a crowded Wifi connection for example, but again it does not matter what is reasonable or not. If you are trying to make sales or even just build a following of regular visitors, then you need to do what you can to bring your website loading time down as low as possible.

What Happens If My Website Is Slow?

Well, for a start, you can look at what you do personally when you find yourself on a slower website. How long do you wait for the main page to load? How likely are you to consider browsing through the website if the first page loaded too slowly? You may be more or less patient than the average viewer so your own interactions with websites are not going to cover what everyone else does. That’s why we put together this information on website load time statistics from multiple studies on the subject.

79% of customers who run into any kind of performance issues on your website are less likely to buy from you again. This covers more than just the time load time of your website, but the speed of your website is one of the easiest things to fix on order to prevent hesitation among repeat buyers.

A delay in load time of just one second can leave you with a 7% reduction in conversions. For example, if your website is bringing in $100,000 per day in sales that one second delay could be costing you $7,000 per day or more.

That same one second delay in the loading of a page also means that around 11% of your potential viewers will simply close the page or back out of it without even seeing what you have to offer.

Another point to keep in mind is the “bounce rate” of the viewers who land on your website. The bounce rate tells you in percentage terms how many of your viewers are leaving your website after viewing just one page. It could be that they do not wish to continue on your website because it is performing badly, or it could also be that they found the relevant information they needed on the first page they looked at. So, this statistic will need to be viewed on a site by site basis to really see if it is a problem or not.

The point of all of this is that, speed affects your bottom line and even if you’re not selling anything, it affects how people see you as a person or a brand.

How Can I Speed It Up?

First of all, you should find out how fast your website is loading from more locations than just your home internet connection or from a smartphone. You also need to get exact numbers. It is not that helpful to ask a friend to visit your website and then report back. They will most likely just say “it was fast,” with no more details.

To get more specific, you should use one of the many site speed test tools that can be found online with a quick search. These tools will allow you to test the speed of your website from different locations around the world while also giving you more precise numbers on load times. You can set up monitoring so that you will receive alerts if your website begins to perform slowly or goes offline altogether.

If you’re not already using Google Analytics or some other similar website analytics package, then you should start now. Google Analytics is free and it will allow you to see much more information about your website visitors than what you are aware of right now. For example, you can see the bounce rate, which was discussed in the earlier segment. If that is too high then you will know you need to work on it.

One of the main reasons for slow website loading is the type of hosting plan that the owner has bought. You get what you pay for in the world of hosting. If you are only paying a few dollars per month for hosting then there is a very high chance that your host is not providing you with the best hardware and bandwidth available.

Another important factor in website speed is the size of images and other elements that appear on a page. If you have a website that is heavy on images, then you need to make sure they are optimized for the web. This can be done with software such as Photoshop or a free alternative. It can even be done automatically by other means, such as a WordPress plugin.

Don’t forget to check out the full infographic for more information on this topic. It is full of real life examples and figures that should definitely make you get serious about the speed of your own website.

Since August 2005, Facebook has acquired 68 companies costing the social media network a total of $23,124,700,000 USD – not including undisclosed payments.

However, this is unsurprising since Facebook has established itself as one of the most powerful social media giants in the world, and it has the user count to prove it. As of 2016, just over 10 years after it’s inception, Facebook has a total of 1.7 billion users.

The below infographic created by TechWyse lists each and every company acquired by Facebook since August 2005.

Some of it’s most memorable purchases include its acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012, and Whatsapp Messenger, a mobile group messaging app, for $19 billion – the largest acquisition yet.

Check out the below infographic to learn more about the companies Facebook has purchased, and determine for yourself which you think were worth the money. Even more, learn about some of the rising and falling trends that have taken place in the tech industry since 2005.

A lot of marketers have a love-hate relationship with Reddit. However, completely avoiding Reddit is a big mistake.

As they call it, Reddit is really “The Front Page of the Internet”. While the slogan seems interesting, Reddit is essentially a Reddit is basically a social news aggregation, web content rating and discussion forum. It is rated as the 11th most visited website in the world. This reason only is enough tells us how popular it has become in the market.

One might want to ask “doesn’t it sound the best place to promote your work?” Well, of course it does. However, don’t forget that Reddit users (or “Redditors”) POSITIVELY despise self-promotion. That said, you have to constrain yourself for being overly promoting your stuffs on Reddit.

So, here in this infographic, we will take you through all the features that you will come across at Reddit and how can you become a great marketer using them.

Coinciding with the coming of Christmas, Twitter is releasing a new set of research reports looking at how shoppers in different regions use the platform in their buying process.

First up is Australia, with Twitter data showing that 83% of Australian Twitter users love Christmas and one in three use the platform to get inspiration about Christmas gifts. Twitter’s data also shows that one in two Australian Twitter users learn about new products and brands via tweet.

There’s some interesting insights to consider. Take a look at the full infographic for Australia below.

Do you need your business to flourish? Then, apart from a great product, you must harness the power of branding.

Unlike most people think, branding is not just for the big companies with bigger budgets. If small businesses want to thrive amongst cut throat competition, then they need to embrace branding too. At first, branding for small business might be daunting. However, once you know your audience it can help you set the tone for all your communication to that audience. Get your audience to relate to your content and your message. Then the creation of this organic connection is valuable for your business and services.

If you’re going to be blogging regularly, then you will be in need to choose the right CMS. Using CMS is much better for helping your manage your content without having to know how to code. A CMS is your blog’s platform. There are various platforms that bloggers can use, but WordPress is the most approachable.

However, there are more options out there. Take a look at the infographic below for more popular CMS you can use for your blog.

Are retail brands ready for the social media holiday rush? Will they keep pace with their customers’ expectations and respond on social quickly?

With the coming of holiday season, the stakes are higher than ever for retailers, especially when National Retail Federation estimated that holiday sales will increase to $656 billion in 2016. In today’s post, we’ll present an infographic that examines how well Fortune 100 retail brands are engaging with consumers across social platforms.

The infographic reveals that the retail industry did well in interacting with their consumers, providing insights into the products they sold, posting content about getting the most from those products and often linking to promotions that can drive sales. As retail brands seek to garner attention from consumers during the holiday rush, it is crucial for them to engage, listen and respond to customers on social media. In fact, Twitter found that customers are willing to spend up to 20% more with a brand if that brand responds to their social media activities.